Effective Leadership in The Modern Workplace with Steven Turner

Leadership in the workplace is paramount for organizational success. A strong leader fosters a positive work culture, motivates teams, and navigates challenges with resilience. Effective leadership inspires collaboration, innovation, and employee engagement, creating a foundation for growth. How can we continuously enhance leadership skills to propel our teams and organizations forward? In today's episode, I had an insightful talk with Steven Turner, the Founder of Business Flow Solutions. Our discussion centered around nuances of leadership development and effective employee training strategies. We explored key aspects such as cultivating a positive work culture, fostering employee development, and addressing motivation, engagement, and retention challenges in the workplace. Tune in and unlock leadership insights! --- Listen to the podcast here: Effective Leadership in The Modern Workplace with Steven Turner Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We’ve all had different experiences in different organizations and I think almost anyone listening that has worked for different organizations, worked for different managers within the same organization has experienced a difference between a manager and a leader, and I believe this is something I may have briefly talked about on some other previous episodes, being a manager is a person who can check off the Q2 list of tasks, make sure everything’s kind of going according to schedule, whereas a leader is someone that actually inspires their employees to be the best, inspires their employees to grow, and I think most of us would prefer to work under leaders. To elaborate on this topic, I would like to introduce my guest, Steven Turner. He is the founder of Business Flow Solutions [sic]. --- Steven, welcome to the program. Good to be here. Thank you very much. So, you talk quite a bit about how to develop as a leader. What in your view truly makes someone a leader? Well, the biggest thing about leadership, first of all, is just accept the fact that it’s not all about you, it’s about your team, and, as a result of being team oriented, you’re in a much better position to actually show interest in individual employees and develop them as individuals as opposed to just employees. That’s a massive conversation. I’ll give you the importance based on what happened to me. I think this is as good a way of any to explain it. But when I got started, I was a supervisor at UPS when I was a sophomore in college and UPS had part-time supervisors. So, when I got started, I got started early, I was 20 years old, and the people that were reporting to me were most likely older than I was. So, in your 30s, 40s, and 50s, nobody really cares too much. But in your 20s, a 22-year-old doesn’t like a 20-year-old guiding their life at the office. So I had to make a decision on day one of how was I going to make this work, so I simply decided to do this, I would treat others the way I’d like to be treated. It worked on day one and it’s worked for 45 years since that date.Share on X So, in the process of leading people, if we always remember and always put ourselves in a position where we can put ourselves in their shoes so that we can see and understand what we’re saying, how would we like to receive what we think we’re trying to say, and I found it to be a massively beneficial approach because it allows the individual to be an individual, opposed to just doing something because I said so. Yeah. So this was apparent to you when you were 20. When you were starting out, you kind of just looked around and said, “I need to do this, I need to treat others how I would want to be treated.” Why do you think this idea is so much harder to realize and enact for so many other people in leadership positions? Historically, it goes all the way back to the Industrial Revolution. Management people have been reproducing themselves generation after generation after generation. And, unfortunately, when the Industrial Revolution started in 1850 in the United States and farmers came off the fields and started working for somebody else and they entered into that dynamic, whereas farmers were always responsible for everything they ever did and they managed their cash flow based on getting paid two or three times a year. Now, they move into the factories and they’re getting paid more often, once a week or twice a month or whatever the case may be, and now they have to listen to somebody else telling them what to do. And that doesn’t settle too well because we as human beings have a desire to rule ourselves and, as a result, when businesspeople started telling people what to do, they compromised that human desire in the employees. They had no say in what they were doing. And the proof of that is that six years later, in 1856, the labor unions showed up. So that’s when they showed up. That’s when they started. And they came as a result of employees not liking the work environment. As time went on, and in 1895, there was a gentleman named Frederick Winslow Taylor, who was recognized in the business world as being probably the first industrial engineer by name, and I have nothing against industrial engineers because UPS has a great group of engineers. However, he made a statement that people took to heart and that was run business by numbers and, as a result, the human element was left out. And management people forgot that it’s actually people that do the work. So, management teams, again, they tend to replicate themselves. So generation after generation, we’ve got the whole thing, a lot of it still exists, and, all of a sudden, we bump into the great resignation. We come out of the pandemic era, and we know that in the pandemic, there was a lot of people that quit their jobs after they were asked to come to work. Now, that’s an interesting dynamic because people got to spend time at home, they did their eight-hour job over a twelve-hour period, worked in some family things along the way, when the time came to go back to work, they didn’t want to go. They didn’t want to go back. To be losing the flexibility, but they didn’t want to go back to the environment they just got released from. And that really came as a result of the way management people were managing. There was no desire to go back. And there has to be that desire. Employees have to have a desire to want to work for who they report to. Now, that’s where the leadership thing comes in. When you go back to the way I started by treating people the way I’d like to be treated, that’s a good environment. That’s a good situation for people to work in. One thing great about UPS, basically, if you do well, you’re left alone, and I was left alone for 34 years in the management team there. I did my own thing for 34 years. During the process of doing that, I worked in operations, finance and accounting, and the technology groups, and the approach of leadership that I developed worked in every case. Different types of job functions, essentially. Right. Because people are the common thread. Now, one of the things I spent five years in Europe during UPS’s initial international expansion, and while I was over there, I was a finance director in 10 countries, 10 small countries. We had finance directors at Italy, Spain, France, the UK, and Germany. I had everything else. So I worked in the countries from the Nordic countries, so you got Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, down through Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, recent Turkey and Ireland over on the other side. So I had an opportunity to work in these different cultures and I learned something valuable. Unfortunately, I didn’t think of it while I was over there but I did think of it when I started the coaching business. It didn’t matter where I was. People are the same all over. Cultures vary, but hearts don’t.Share on X People just want to be cared for. They want to be well trained, they want to have a future, they want to be appreciated, and in that type of environment, people will be willing to do their best so now they’re being inspired to do the best rather than being forced to obey a manager. That was a long answer to your question but… Well, it’s interesting to hear the history of it because one of the things I often observe myself is that, first, as you mentioned, in the industrial revolution, we made that shift from the farm to the factory and now, say, mostly in the last 50 to 75 years, a lot of work cultures now have made the shift from the factory to what people call office jobs or the service sector which also has a completely different type of dynamic and I often observe that we never really updated our culture in the sense that, in the factory, it mattered what time you showed up, it mattered how many hours you were there, that was a direct one-to-one connection, until someone got too tired to work between the value produced and the number of hours that you’re physically standing in a specific location, whereas a lot of the work we do today, it’s not nearly as connected and it’s not the same exact kind of work, some of it’s a lot more intellectually taxing and stuff like that. And one of the things that I always get curious about is how some of these ideas that you talk about are innate to humanity. People want that flexibility. People want to have some sort of dominion over their own lives, their own selves. People want to be cared for. People want to be inspired. But to me, it feels like there was a 50-year period before the pandemic from 1970 to 2020 where we didn’t really think through this on a mass scale and, somehow, things kept ticking on, employees kept just mostly dealing with this somewhat less than ideal situation. And it’s fascinating to me about why that happened....